Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is campaigning against President Joe Biden for the Democrats' presidential nomination, is blasting the Democratic National Committee for refusing to have primary debates, telling reporters at the Iowa State Fair that allowing the party to pick the eventual candidate is like what happened in the former Soviet Union.
"Part of having a democracy is that the public, actually the rank and file of the Democratic Party, the public gets to pick the candidate," Kennedy said Tuesday, reports Forbes. "The best way to pick them is to have debates and to have town halls [and] to have to do retail politics."
This means facing the press and the public, added Kennedy, "because otherwise, we have politicians who are living inside a bubble, and the only people they're talking to are the billionaires who are writing the checks."
He added that the nation is living in a period of history when it's become important to convince the American public that "the system is not rigged against them and that we have a real democracy in our country," and part of that is allowing the public to pick the nominees for the presidency.
"I see what's happening in the American heartland," said Kennedy. "I see the desperation, the mental illness. We've never seen anything like this before, the epidemics of opioids … the epidemics of alcoholism, of depression, drug abuse."
Americans are also being "crushed by" debt, and it's important to speak with them, including "going to kitchen tables," said Kennedy.
"It's very easy for politicians to sit in a big mansion in Washington, D.C., and forget about the rest of the country," he told the reporters. "I don't think that's good for our democracy."
His comments come after a USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed that 80% of Democrat primary voters want to see a debate between President Joe Biden and his opponents, Kennedy and author Marianne Williamson.
However, Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said in an email to the news outlet that no incumbent president, Democrat or Republican, has done primary debates.